CONSTRUCTIONIST TEACHING AND LEARNING OF MATHEMATICS THROUGH THE OPTICS OF QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGY

Constructionism enables the realization of such learning process that is designed as a developed entity of elaboration of information into intelligent human thoughts, products and artifacts, which have mental (idea), manual (materialistic product/artifact) and expressive (artistic product/artifact) form. The learning and teaching process is created by the learning subjects (learners) together with the teaching subjects – they take the role of designers. Such subjects are protagonists of active elaboration of information gained from the outside and use the competence to identify and acquire relevant information, together with the competence to search for information obtained in the learning problem, learning theme/topic. Constructionism in the learning and teaching process is an activity of integration of intelligence (to deal with problems and to be creative), in which the subjects make an effort to transcribe and translate relevant information (as an important entity), into their own mental activity. It is primary about processes of transforming the known into unknown and vice versa, resulting in various versions of knowing/understanding. Thus students learn in an active and conscious way, therefore learn more than is required from the subject matter itself. This scientific study focused on the realization of a learning and teaching process in which the goal was to create an experimentally based (by experimenting with learning materials, sources and relevant information, when constructing the structure, the perimeter and the area of a plane figure in the fifth grade of elementary school), explicative, educating video from students for students in mathematics. Inductive and participative didactics, qualitative methodology, with an appertaining design, were applied. Two different outcomes of this study could be found. From the process of making the video and from the realization of a constructionist design of the learning and teaching process. The participating subjects made up from two 5th grade classes at elementary school.